The Marquis de Sade’s earliest work of fiction, The 120 Days of Sodom, is also his most extreme. It tells the story of four libertines – a duke, a bishop, a judge and a banker – who lock themselves away in a castle with an entourage that includes two harems of teenage boys and girls. Four ageing prostitutes, appointed as storytellers, each tell of 150 “passions” or perversions over the course of a month. The libertines enact the passions they hear described, and as these become more violent, the narrative builds to a murderous climax. Though Sade never finished his novel, and the last three parts are in note form only, it remains a uniquely disturbing work.

And therefore uniquely challenging to translate. Perhaps this was the reason no one had attempted a new translation since the one first published by Austryn Wainhouse in 1954 (and revised with Richard Seaver in 1966). In any case, Thomas Wynn and I felt a new version was long overdue, and, much to our surprise, Penguin Classics agreed.

Dealing with the violence was not the only challenge we faced: The 120 Days is also Sade’s most obscene work of fiction. Over the course of three years, this indeed was the issue that prompted the most discussion and debate between us. How exactly were we to translate the various rude words of the original French? Was a vit a prick, dick or a cock? Were tétons boobs, tits or breasts? Was a derrière a behind, a backside or, indeed, a derrière? Was a cul a bum or an arse? While Wainhouse adopted an eccentric idiom that could be best described as mock-Tudor, we decided to try as far as possible to use sexual slang that was still in use today – as long as it did not sound gratingly contemporary.

Portrait of the Marquis de Sade, 1760.

Translating obscenity into your own language takes some getting used to. However familiar one becomes with another language, a trace of otherness always remains. Sometimes this can add to the beauty of the language, or to its mystique, but when it comes to obscenity there is a distinct softening effect. Rude words in other languages never have quite the same force, so translating them into one’s own language brings the obscenity home in more ways than one.

English reserve probably plays a part in the process, too. When we started translating 120 Days I soon realised I was instinctively toning the original down, avoiding words that I found jarringly ugly. I may not have overcome that entirely (no dicks or cocks for me, thank you very much!) but I realised pretty quickly that a watered-down version of Sade’s novel would be the worst possible outcome. The last thing we wanted to produce was a text that was any less shocking – and therefore potentially appealing – than the original. We had a duty to be just as rude, crude, and revolting as Sade.

To ensure consistency we compiled our own Sadean lexicon as we were translating. Once we had debated the various possible translations of a particular word we would try to settle on one and stick to it. Usually. So a vit would always be a prick, and a cul would always be an arse.

But this wasn’t always possible. When it came to translating tétons, for example, one word was not enough. One of our most treasured resources as translators was the University of Chicago’s database of old French dictionaries, which includes several from the 17th and 18th centuries.

One of the things this showed was that téton was not always quite as familiar or coarse as the English “tit” (Molière and Voltaire both used it), so we had to be attentive to these different inflections. In cases like these, it matters whether the word is written by the narrator or spoken by one of the characters, whether it is said by a man or a woman, neutrally or insultingly, and so on – a man or woman writing “breasts” is very different to a man saying “tits” and very different to a woman saying “boobs”.

The term that gave us the most trouble by far was the verb se branler – a slang term meaning to masturbate that is still commonly used by French speakers today. There may be no shortage of English equivalents, but nor is there any shortage of Englishes to consider – and therein lies the problem. The most obvious English equivalent – “to wank” – would be unfamiliar and odd on one side of the Atlantic, while “to jerk off” would be familiar but decidedly American in its associations to English readers. We contemplated “to pleasure oneself” but it seemed a little sex-positive and a little too polite, while “fapping” had yet to hit the public (or our) consciousness.

Ultimately, we decided on “to frig” even though we were aware that this use of the word would be unfamiliar to many readers – particularly those too young to remember the Sex Pistols’ version of Friggin’ in the Riggin’ (1979). When we canvassed our students, most thought “frig” was a euphemism for “fuck”; and indeed most dictionaries now give “have sexual intercourse with” as the first definition, and “to masturbate” as the second.

But “to frig” works in a way that the alternatives do not – it is compact, and usable reflexively or non-reflexively, and transitively or intransitively. We think – or hope – its general unfamiliarity might work in its favour for many readers, as this will mean it won’t have strong associations of one particular form of English. In any case, as it occurs so frequently in our translation, we hope readers will soon get used to it and that its initial strangeness will soon be forgotten.

Who knows – perhaps the legacy of this translation will be a return of frigging?

Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, translated by Will McMorran and Thomas Wynn, was published earlier this month as a Penguin Classic in the UK. It will be released in North America on December 27 2016.

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Sade, according to Andrea Dworkin, is ‘the world’s most foremost pornographer’. This is not a compliment.

With this dubiously preeminent status, Sade apparently ‘embodies and defines male sexual values’, and before one has time to interject ‘Those aren’t my values’ or ‘That’s not my locker room chat’, Dworkin continues: ‘In him, one finds rapist and writer twisted in one scurvy knot. His life and writing were of a piece, a whole cloth soaked in the blood of women imagined and real.’

One would be hard pushed to see The 120 Days of Sodom as anything less than a deeply misogynistic work, soaked in the blood of imaginary women. The Duc informs the women at Silling that they are ‘feeble, fettered creatures’, destined solely for the libertines’ pleasures, and that ‘the life of one woman – did I say of one woman? of all the women inhabiting the earth’s surface – is as insignificant as the swatting of a fly.’ The female body is reviled: ‘I’ve never understood how tits could really serve any other purpose than wiping arses’, says the Duc, while Curval asks ‘do you realize what kind of creature a woman is? One who can, like an oven, hatch some snot deep inside her vagina?’ The male libertines are squeamish at the sight of a vagina, and their female victims are warned ‘As a rule, offer your fronts to us only very rarely – remember that the rancid part of your body which Nature only formed in a moment of madness is always the one that revolts us the most.’ And with the female victims of violence in the tales far out-numbering the male victims, could Sade’s novel be any more misogynistic?

Yes, is the unfortunate reply.

Will and I have arguably made The 120 Days of Sodom more misogynistic than Les 120 journées de Sodome, because we have certainly – though unwillingly – made it more violent against women.

We have, for instance, clearly identified the victim’s sex when it is suggested more discreetly in the original French. When Sade writes, for example, ‘Il coupe les deux fesses, après l’avoir enculée et fouettée’, we give ‘He cuts off both her buttocks, having buggered and flogged [her]’, replacing the quiet agreement of the past participle by a more strongly identified personal pronoun (in our defence, we flag up our intervention). Moreover, we have often been obliged to designate the victim’s sex where none exists in Sade’s original. French uses gender-neutral pronouns (e.g. ‘Il lui fend les lèvres et les narines’; ‘Il lui arrache plusieurs ongles des doigts, des mains ou des pieds’) whereas English must introduce a gendered possessive pronoun (‘He splits his/her lips and nostrils’; ‘He tears off several nails from his/her fingers or toes’). But options aren’t, well, an option, and we must specify the victim’s sex, though which one?

Because Sade’s victims are almost always female (identified by the appropriate pronoun, or primary and secondary sexual characteristics); because he flags it up when the victims are male (‘She announces that the following are buggers who murder male victims only’) thereby implying that female victims are the norm; and because we haven’t found a single occurrence when a victim is identifiable as male solely because of the agreement of the past participle, we make these victims female…

… ‘He splits her lips and nostrils’ and ‘He tears off several nails from her fingers or toes’.

The requirement to provide as straightforward and as clear as possible a translation of Sade’s novel has, it turns out, obliged us to make The 120 Days of Sodom even more misogynistic than the source text. We point out some of these predicaments and decisions in the editorial notes, but we can’t – we won’t – identify them all. To do so would distract the reader too much. It would also smack not so much of disapproval than of priggishness. Translators should not protest too much.

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1. Makes her run naked on a freezing winter’s night in the middle of a garden, and there are ropes stretched across at intervals to trip her.

2. A bugger of men and women alike employs another powder whose effect is to deprive you of your senses and render you as if dead; you are indeed believed to be so – you are buried and you die in despair in your coffin, where you immediately come to your senses. He endeavours to stand over the spot in which you are buried to see if he can hear any screams – if he does he faints with pleasure. He has some of his family killed in this way.

3. They make her swallow a serpent which in turn will devour her.

4. He lets a girl sleep in her usual bedroom, the window of which she knows is very low to the ground: she is given opium; when she is fast asleep, she is moved to another bedroom identical to her own save for a window far higher off the ground that opens on to sharp stones; next, he barges into her bedroom, terrifying her; he tells her he is going to kill her; knowing her window to be low to the ground, she opens it and leaps through in great haste, but she falls on to the sharp stones from over thirty feet high, killing herself without anyone laying a finger on her.

5. He attaches a young girl, slim and attractive, to serve as a rod for a large rocket – she is carried off and falls back to earth with the rocket.

6. Sends for a woman with beautiful hair under the sole pretext of examining it, but treacherously cuts it off and comes when he sees her lament this misfortune, which makes him laugh a great deal.

7. He sews a girl into a fresh donkey-skin, with her head sticking out; he feeds her, and leaves her inside it until the animal’s hide suffocates her as it shrinks.

8. The seducer mentioned by Duclos gathers two women together: he exhorts the first to save her life by renouncing God and her religion, but she has been prompted beforehand not to do anything of the sort and told that if she does she will be killed, while if she does not no harm will come to her. She stands firm and he blows her brains out – ‘There’s one for God!’ He summons the second woman who, struck both by this example and by what she was told on the sly – that the only way to save her life was to renounce God – does everything that is asked of her. He blows her brains out – ‘There’s another for the Devil! The scoundrel plays this little game every week.

9. To combine incest, adultery, sodomy and sacrilege, he buggers his married daughter with a host.

10. He has the girl placed on a small trestle facing a deep pond, beyond which is a wall that offers an escape all the more assured as there is a ladder leaning against it, but first she has to dive into the pond, and this is all the more urgent as behind the trestle upon which she is placed a slow-burning fire is gaining on her little by little – if the fire reaches her she will be consumed, and if she dives into the water to avoid the fire she will drown as she does not know how to swim; with the fire upon her, she nevertheless chooses to throw herself into the water and head for the ladder she sees against the wall. Often the girl will drown, and there is no more to be said; if she is fortunate enough to reach the ladder she climbs up it, but a sabotaged rung near the top breaks underfoot when she reaches it, tipping her into a pit covered over with earth, which she had not seen and which, buckling under her weight, drops her into a flaming brazier where she perishes.

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People often talk about a book or a film being ‘powerful’. But powerful how? What kinds of power might a work of fiction be able to exert over its readers? Does a novel have the power to change us – to improve us, or to harm us? The theme of dangerous novels is as old as the novel itself, and there is a long list of fictional readers damaged by their taste in books – Don Quixote and Emma Bovary being only the most famous cases. As literary works are often imagined to be morally improving and civilizing, the question of harm rarely seems to arise. Though some critics and philosophers have argued (unencumbered by evidence) that good books have made us better people, none has spent much time worrying about what bad books might do to us. But when a reader encounters a work like the 120 Days, the question no longer seems quite so abstract or irrelevant. If ever there was a powerful text, then surely it’s this one. Few readers can be left unruffled or undisturbed by the tales told and deeds done in the Castle of Silling – even if critics working on Sade have largely avoided talking about their own responses to these. That said, most readers will read the 120 Days only once, and leave it behind. The sense of shock will fade, and normal life will resume. Every now and again a mental image of a particular scene may resurface uninvited, but only fleetingly – life is too short to dwell on such things.

Not so for the translator, however. Translation requires an intimacy with source material that may be one of the reasons why some of Sade’s works – such as the New Justine – remain untranslated, while other major works such as the History of Juliette, and, until now, the 120 Days, have only been translated once, back in the 1950s. Why would anyone choose to live with these texts for the days, months, years it takes to translate them? For me there were many reasons – the challenge of translating Sade’s most extreme work, the poor quality of the existing translation (which was a bar to being able to teach this text in translation), and a curiosity about how the novel would be received in a country where Sade had been banned until quite recently. But though I had read the text closely before, and, indeed written about it, I don’t think I realised the scale of the task that was ahead of us, and the time I would have to spend in the company of Sade’s libertines.

Rather sneakily, when we split the text between us I chose the first half of Part 1 rather than the second – thinking that this way I might avoid more of the excremental material that dominates its middle section. I didn’t manage to escape this entirely, however, and spent three weeks translating material that gives the lie to Roland Barthes’s confident claim that ‘written down, shit does not smell’. It really can smell awful, and the nausea meant I could not work for more than two hours without taking a break to do something else. In the introduction, Sade’s narrator compares the novel to a great feast at which every reader will find a dish that delights them. The truth is that few readers will find any such dish, and what they will find instead are some that simply make them want to get up and leave.

As unpleasant as the smellier sections of Part 1 were, for me this paled into insignificance compared to the escalating violence of the novel’s latter stages. In Part 4 of the novel, Desgranges, the storyteller for that month, describes a series of ‘murderous passions’ which inspire the libertines in her audience to enact what they have heard. The list is in note form, resembling at times a series of gruesome telegrams, or a set of instructions for a would-be torturer. While some seem too surreal, or too ludicrous, to take seriously, others are almost unbearable, let alone unreadable. The section I dreaded returning to most when the time came for editing and proofreading was a series of tortures reserved for pregnant women. A section I hope never to read again.

In order to get the job done I found myself doing exactly what I have criticised many of Sade’s critics for doing: I focussed on the form rather than the content, on the words rather than the violence represented by those words. As I didn’t have the option of skimming the pages (one way of reading without absorbing too much of the violence) I found that reading closely, microscopically even, was the next best thing: not being able to see the wood for the trees can be a good thing when translating material like this. This is why translation is not necessarily the model form of reading it is sometimes held to be: to read closely is not always to read well. But despite my best efforts to read unresponsively, unimaginatively, it was not always possible to keep the violence of the acts described in the novel at arm’s length. Translating felt like a struggle for agency – sometimes it felt like I was acting on the text, sometimes it felt like the text was acting on me. It was, to put it mildly, unsettling, to see my own words describing acts I could never otherwise have imagined – as if by doing so I was becoming an accessory to this violence.

Is it possible to translate violence without becoming complicit? There is no easy answer to this, but ultimately Tom and I both felt that we had to let the violence of the original speak for itself and trust our reader to respond accordingly. We agreed that the worst thing we could possibly do was to soften the violence in any way – to produce a text that was less shocking, and less repugnant than the original. If we were going to do this properly, we had to make our version just as raw, vicious, and visceral as Sade had made his. The 120 Days does not seduce its readers, it assaults them – and we had to do the same. So when our lovely editor at Penguin told us that she had been reduced to tears by her reading of our complete draft, I felt both guilty and relieved – guilty to have put her through that experience, but relieved that we had succeeded in conveying at least some of the original work’s power to shock and upset.

Will

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In an interview with the Paris Review (summer 2015), Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, translators of Dostoevsky, were asked ‘What is it like living in a world of toxic narrators and tortured murderers for five years? Does it affect you personally?’ Volokhonsky answers, ‘No. It’s a professional thing.’ But Pevear replies, ‘Oh, it does. I think it affects me, certainly. […] You didn’t see me twitching?’ to which Volokhonsky remarks, ‘We had two small children in a row. I had my blind old mother living with us. I had my own solid reality right there.’ I side with Pevear, for my own lengthy proximity to Sade has not been an easy ride. Notwithstanding my close collaboration with Will, translating The120 Days of Sodom’s stories of rape, mutilation and murder has often been disturbing and gruelling. There is, for instance, a girl in Day 15 whose predicament fills me with pity and nausea every time I read it, yet I help to create this scene of scatological humiliation for the reader’s interest. Like Pevear, I twitch.

How might the translator position himself or herself in relation to such material? Volokhonsky’s two responses are illuminating: first, she views herself as doing a job; and second, personal relationships kept her grounded in ‘solid reality’, as if professionalism can only take one so far. The first answer intrigues me, for it is once self-evident and insufficient. ‘Professional’ is a baggy term – there are as many ways of being professional as there are professions. What kind of professional should I be? Sade’s novel itself provides an answer. Of the 46 characters who arrive at the castle of Silling, 30 are slaughtered; aside from the four libertines, those most likely to survive have identifiable occupations, namely the three cooks and the four bawds employed as storytellers – all seven of these women return to Paris, and handsomely paid to boot. So which profession should I follow in my (alas less lucrative) translation practice – the cook or the storyteller?

Food and stories certainly overlap in the novel (‘This is the story of a magnificent feast where 600 different dishes are offered for your delectation’), but the cooks and storytellers are distinct in characterization and role. Nameless, faceless and almost entirely silent, the cooks are defined solely by their function: ‘there was no one more refined and skilful than the cooks [the libertines] had brought with them, and they were so well paid and so well supplied that everything was bound to go marvellously well.’ Their talents protect them from violence, and their one moment of (reported) speech is listened to: ‘The cooks protest and say the service cannot continue if the maids are harassed, and so they are left alone until the month of March.’ The four storytellers, on the contrary, are named, described at length and rhetorically sophisticated, being ‘gifted with a certain eloquence and with a turn of wit appropriate to what was required of them’. These women also actively participate in the events at Silling – they aid and abet the libertines in murder:

As soon as everyone is in bed the Bishop goes to fetch his brother: they take Desgranges and Duclos with them; all four take Aline down to the crypt; the Bishop buggers her, as does the Duc; they pronounce her death sentence then carry it out with excessive torments that last until dawn. As they return upstairs they sing the praises of the two storytellers and counsel the other two always to make use of them in their tortures.

The choice between translator-as-cook and translator-as-storyteller seems uncomplicated. Since dishes and stories resemble each other, I am not compelled to plump for the more obvious choice of the storyteller as my model, so I’ll take the kitchen over the chamber of stories, and will discreetly serve up to Sade the English words he needs to feed his new readers. I’ll not be party to the violence, and I’ll wash my hands when the work is done.

But that’s too easy. Hidden in their kitchen, the cooks may disavow any complicity with the events that their efforts fuel and thereby enable. They can seal themselves off, minimising contact with the libertines and their victims: ‘from the gallery one entered a very pretty dining room fitted with tower-shaped cabinets, which, communicating directly with the kitchens, allowed the food to be served hot, promptly and without the need for a valet.’ As a translator of disturbing material, I must recognize my complicity with an author who intends to incite and excite his readers, and that in my service to him I make linguistic choices to give the appropriate spice and flavour to his text. I leave the safety of the kitchen and follow Madame Duclos to the rostrum, accepting that I too am an agent charged, at least in part, with bringing pleasure to the reader: ‘I should dread to broach the subject of the tales which will occupy us for the whole of this week, but as depraved as it may be, I know your tastes too well to fear offending you and am on the contrary very sure you will be pleased with me.’ Avowing my role in producing The 120 Days of Sodom has paradoxically offered some protection against Sade’s ‘toxic narrators and tortured [or rather torturing] murderers’, for this is the first step in recognizing and meeting the ethical challenges that ensue.

Tom

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The four heroes of The 120 Days of Sodom give much thought as to where they should hole up for their four months of stories, sex and violence. They choose the castle of Silling – belonging to one of their number – where they may give full rein to their passions and imaginations. The castle is described as being ‘far from France, in a land where [the scoundrel] had nothing to fear, in the depths of an uninhabitable forest, in a refuge within this forest, which, through the measures taken, only birds of the air could reach’. But whereabouts might that be? At first we are told that ‘the only setting where this lubricious episode might comfortably take place was that same castle in Switzerland which belonged to Durcet’, and then we are given further directions: ‘To reach there one first had to get to Basel; one then crossed the Rhine, beyond which the road narrowed so much one had to leave the carriages behind; a little later one entered the Black Forest, then plunged further in about 15 leagues along an arduous and tortuous road that was absolutely impracticable without a guide.’ We certainly would need a guide, and one more competent than the narrator who has just sent us in two opposite directions, the Black Forest being in Germany, not Switzerland. This question of displacement lies at the heart of thinking about mistakes.

Sade, like Homer, nods. These authors aren’t alone in slipping up. Daniel Defoe has Robinson Crusoe take off all his clothes so that he can swim out to a ship to salvage goods – yet when the castaway is on board, he fills his pockets with biscuits. Madame Bonacière in Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers is described as a brunette, only to be a blonde a few hundred pages later. And in Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed a family of two girls and a boy becomes one of a young girl and two boys. We shouldn’t be surprised that the 120 Days features numerous errors and inconsistencies, for although its genesis stretched over two and a half years, it was written up at great speed, as the final line of the manuscript indicates: ‘All this great scroll was begun on 22nd 8ber [i.e. October] 1785 and finished in 37 days.’ The novel remains in draft form, and as such was not subject to the same scrutiny that Sade paid to his other works. He recognizes the work’s unpolished nature when, at the end of the novel’s first part, he lists the ‘Mistakes I have made’ and notes in particular ‘as I’ve been unable to reread myself, this must surely be teeming with other mistakes’.

Sade may not have reread himself, but in translating the 120 Days for Penguin Classics, Will and I have reread him, again and again. And, we can confirm Sade’s suspicions: there are indeed several mistakes in the novel. Linguistic errors, such as incorrect verb endings, are numerous in the manuscript, but are of limited interest, and we did not write incorrect English in a gesture of fidelity. More important are errors of continuity, and here are a few examples of what one might call Sade’s bloopers.

Sade feared that that the large number of characters in the novel would lead to mistakes: ‘When I make a fair copy, one of my first concerns should be to have a notebook nearby at all times, where I’ll need to enter each incident and each portrait as I write them for without that I shall become horribly confused because of the multitude of characters.’ For instance, the young boy Giton is first described as being thirteen years old, but he soon drops to being twelve. But it’s not just the numerous minor characters who trip up Sade, but his four libertines. We read at the very start of the novel: ‘It was towards the end of this reign and shortly before the Regent had attempted, through that famous tribunal known by the name of the Chamber of Justice, to force this multitude of tax-collectors to return their ill-gotten gains, that four among them conceived the unique feat of debauchery we are about to describe.’ But only one of the four libertines is a financier; the others are a duke, a bishop and a judge. Later in the novel we read that ‘The Président – with his troop – went and shut himself away and after half an hour, which the Bishop, Durcet and Curval, along with the remaining subjects, did not spend in prayer […]’; Sade probably means the Duc rather than Curval, given that the Président and Curval are one and the same person.

The reader of the 120 Days soon comes to realize that the characters’ bodies are more resilient than one might expect in real life, being able to withstand incredible tortures. Yet it is noteworthy that even though Narcisse’s testicles are cut off on 21 January, two days later he ‘is brought out to be tortured: they burn his thighs and prick, they crush his two balls.’

We have not corrected these and other mistakes, in fact we point them out in our editorial notes so as to remind our readers of the text’s sometimes rudimentary quality, and thereby encourage them to reflect on how the novel’s sex and violence affect them. As in a pornographic film when the cameraman is spotted in a bedroom mirror, or when the boom comes into view in a horror film, the mistakes in the 120 Days can distract the readers, causing them to reconsider the nature and extent of the horror, pity or excitement they feel.

But what of the translator? Unlike the potentially displaced reader, the translator must remain intensely within the novel, tracking its details, alert to slips, discontinuities and errors. Like the enthusiastic Star Wars fan who identifies and publicizes a blooper, I take relish when Sade nods, but what kind of glee may be had when a victim becomes even younger, or when a boy’s testicles are mutilated for a second time? It’s a sense of relief I feel, for at such moments I am superior to Sade; I am not sat alongside him, trying to find the English terms that will provoke the reader in the way he intended; for an instant, I am not of Sade’s party.